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Saturday, November 20, 2010

Web syndication formats like RSS and Atom have revolutionized the way we get information, but even though these formats are standardized and widespread, syndication is still evolving. PubSubHubbub is one of the more interesting advancements in syndication technology, because it actually changes the update method used by clients, from traffic-heavy periodic polling to a publisher-push model. Luckily you don't have to choose one or the other; you can add PubSubHubbub support to your site's feeds without losing compatibility with your more "traditional" readers. This weekend, update your feeds to the latest and greatest in syndication and generate your own hubbub.

How It Works

In Ye Olde-Fashioned Web Syndication of yesteryear, there were exactly two players in each conversation: the publisher (such as a blog or other site producing RSS or Atom content) and the subscriber (an end-user application, such as a feed-aggregating blog reader like Google Reader or TT-RSS, or a stand-alone software app). The publisher updated the content of its feed whenever a new story or post went live.

To get the new content, however, the subscriber application had to "poll" the feed, querying to see if any new items had been published. Aggregators that subscribed to loads of different feeds therefore had to do lots of polling, and publishers had to respond to loads of queries even when there was nothing new.

PubSubHubbub adds a new intermediary to the mix, the hub, that essentially keeps track of all of that publisher/subscriber state, and reduces the workload on both the publisher and the subscriber. There have been intermediary "feed service providers" in the past, such as Feedburner, and, in practice, hubs are such a service. The publisher registers its feed with with the hub, and sends updates notices to the hub whenever new content is available. The publisher's feed is the same, except for an extra <link> element with the rel="hub" attribute pointing to its hub of choice.

The subscriber subscribes to the feed just like it would any traditional RSS or Atom feed, but it notices the "hub" link embedded in the content. It, too, registers with the hub, and in the future it skips polling that particular feed. Instead, whenever a hub gets an update, the hub forwards the new content to the subscriber immediately. Not only is there less work for both the publisher and subscriber, but the updates are syndicated in near real-time.

It may seem odd to expect better performance by introducing a middleman into the process, but the bandwidth savings come from having the hub efficiently aggregate lots of publishers and subscribers, and eliminate the need to do polling altogether.

From the software side, then, there are three components to consider: adding hub support to the feeds that you already publish, running a hub yourself, and using a PubSubHubbub-aware client application to read. Anyone can run a hub, and there is nothing to prevent you from running a hub and publishing a feed at the same time; you have to administer the hub server, but you will still see overall traffic savings.

Pub: Publishing Tools

Thanks to the reduced loads seen in PubSubHubbub, many commercial feed-publishing services already support publishing a PubSubHubbub-compliant feed. These include Wordpress.com, Status.Net, LiveJournal, MySpace, Tumblr, Posterous, and many of the Google-owned properties (Google Code, YouTube, Picasa, and Blogger — more are rolling out regularly). If you use any of these services personally, you probably do not have to do anything to begin using PubSubHubbub, except perhaps select the hub you wish to use.

For those sites that you run, becoming a PubSubHubbub publisher entails two pieces: making sure that whatever package or content-management system (CMS) produces your feeds correctly tags your Atom or RSS content with the <link rel="hub" ...> element, and making sure that it sends update messages or "pings" to the hub whenever there is new content. Most CMSes and plugins support both, but there are ways to implement them separately if necessary.

There are two separate Publisher plugins for Wordpress, named PubSubHubbub and WP Pubsubhubbub. Both of them support pinging multiple hubs, and tag all of the feeds and feed formats that Wordpress produces (including comment feeds and multiple versions of RSS, for example). The plugin named simply PubSubHubbub is slightly newer, and is compatible with Wordpress releases up to 2.9.2. WP Pubsubhubbub support up to Wordpress 2.8.4.

The latest version of the Drupal CMS supports PubSubHubbub out-of-the-box, as part of the "Feeds" module. There is also a third-party plugin named fastwebfeed that may interest Drupal users running older releases.

Movable Type requires a plugin, developed by a third-party. Interestingly enough, the open-source derivative of Movable Type named Melody has folded the same plugin into its core, so it can serve as a publisher automatically.

In a slightly different vein, the Venus blog aggregator that is used for producing many public "planet" sites has also added Publisher support in recent builds.

Outside of the pre-packaged CMSes, most custom or home-brewed sites can add PubSubHubbub publishing support with an appropriate feed library. The Google Code project wiki maintains a fairly-complete list — there are well-supported packages for Perl, PHP, Ruby, Java, and Python, among other options. Finally, if all else fails and you must manually insert the <link rel="hub" ...> element into your feed template, you can manually ping the hub with a small bookmarklet, provided by the Google Code project.

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About Me

Hi I'm Don,
I write, sing and record songs of my own and I like doing this very much. My music is on my web site. My first album is called DonSongs and my second one is called Living Beings - Climate Control. You can Download and listen and save all our songs on my web site at DonSongs.com and it's completely free. My favorite hobby now is computers. I like to fix old Computers and make them usable again with different Linux Operating Systems or just fix up messed up WindBlows systems;). I really like researching interesting things on the Internet. I read allot about many things, Technical things on computers and the Internet, interesting discoveries in science, new technology, local and world news and just what ever strikes me as interesting. I am very handy and good with tools, fixing and making things. I like to help my friends with their projects when I can. I love Hot Rods and use to do Motor Swaps and put Big Block Chevy Motors where 6 cylinders once were. I love 4 Wheeling and Dirt Bike Riding But I don't have a motorcycle any more. I still really like 4 Wheeling in my 1976 Chevy Blazer, when I can afford the Gas and cost of Broken Parts that is...!!!:O
Don